Edge of Darkness co-writer Andrew Bovell is in charge of turning the 2008 book into a film that will follow the exploits of Chechen Muslim Issa who illegally arrives to live in Hamburg and is soon ensnared in the international war on terror.

Le Carre, who spent time in Hamburg while working as a British agent, also based the novel partly on the real-life tale of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and legal German resident who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001, sent for extraordinary rendition and ended up at Guantanamo Bay before his release in 2006.

It sounds like prime stuff for Corbijn – who last made George Clooney thriller The American – to get his filmmaking teeth into. He’s planning to shoot the movie mostly in Hamburg either later this year or early next.